Moartea domnului Lazarescu

Cristi Puiu (2005)

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, set in the last years of the Ceausescu regime, impressively balances recreation of the time and place with the creation of characters who are realised as people – as more than products of the particular setting.   The Death of Mr Lazarescu, the last Romanian film before 4 Months to achieve significant commercial as well as critical success in Western Europe and North America, is set in the present day;  but it shares this ability to make social and moral points without compromising the individuality of the people on the screen.  The plot is very simple:  Mr Lazarescu is a widower in his early sixties; he’s been suffering from a bad headache and sickness for several days; in the middle of one evening, he phones for an ambulance.  It takes time to arrive (real time in the film).  Once the ambulance – containing two paramedics and Lazarescu – sets off from the block of flats where he lives, the film becomes an odyssey, as a succession of Bucharest hospitals examine the elderly man and decide that he would be better off in a different hospital.  In the course of the night (the film ends in the early hours of the following morning) the patient’s condition deteriorates; a blood clot on the brain is diagnosed – as is terminal liver damage.

As he drifts towards unconsciousness, what Lazarescu says – and of course he has to explain his symptoms repeatedly – makes less and less sense, to the doctors and nurses anyway.  The jumbled phrases make almost increasing sense to the audience:  we have been hearing about the illness from the point at which, although he may have drunk more than is good for him, Lazarescu is fully compos mentis.  The film – especially these exchanges with the medics – is extraordinarily well and sensitively written (by Cristi Puiu and Razvan Radulescu).  In the middle of one of his verbal rambles, Lazarescu says, ‘It’s a question of mortality’.  This is perfectly convincing as a lone sentence that happens to make sense; because it’s convincing in this realistic way, it also conveys Puiu’s principal theme with tremendous force.   The film is about the ebbing away of an individual life, as well the deficiencies of a national health system;   those deficiencies are more shocking because you’re made so intensely aware that Mr Lazarescu is, as Philip Larkin describes his own impending death, ‘spiralling towards extinction’.   The Death of Mr Lazarescu runs 154 minutes but it’s so relentlessly absorbing that it feels long only because of the sympathy that you feel for Lazarescu’s endless wait for the right treatment.  Puiu is remarkably subtle in the way he alters our perception of who is the central consciousness.  The first fifteen minutes or so are virtually all Lazarescu (and the cats who share his apartment).  His neighbours are introduced, then the paramedics; gradually, Lazarescu and Mioara, the woman paramedic trying to find the right care for him, become a double act.  HeHHe gets more ill and less vocal and the point comes when you suddenly realise that she has become the heart of the story.  (You’re as outraged at her treatment by senior medics as you’re distressed that Lazarescu’s voyage threatens to have no ending.)   Finally, Mioara goes off duty – she and the ambulance driver disappear, taking the well-used (soiled) stretcher with them – and Lazarescu moves back into focus, as he is shaved, stripped and prepared for the operating theatre.

Cristi Puiu’s achievement in presenting characters as trapped in their situation but not defined by it is perhaps most brilliant in his depiction of the various hospital staff.   When they’re introduced into the story, you’re nearly always struck by their brusqueness and lack of kindness (this includes even Mioara’s first appearance); then, in most cases (there are two rebarbative exceptions), they say things and reveal facets that complicate them; their behaviour is made, if not likeable, at least understandable – it becomes not just hard to condemn them but difficult to be sure how else they could behave, in their working circumstances.  As a result, Mr Lazarescu is able to offer a much more powerful critique of public health care than would be possible if the doctors and nurses were shown as simply, heroically battling against inadequate resources.  Most of the hospital staff are not unconcerned about Lazarescu but humaneness is severely rationed; you get the sense that they have to develop distancing strategies to keep sane and keep the service running at all.  There’s next to nothing in the script and direction that’s surplus to requirements.  Puiu is highly aware of his ingredients and does different and resonant things with them:  for example, Lazarescu is accused of being a drunk by most of those he encounters but the last reference to alcohol – as it’s applied to his shaven head before his operation – has an ironically sacral quality.  Perhaps, though, the protagonist’s names – Dante Remus Lazarescu, repeated at each new port of call – are a bit too symbolically suggestive for the film’s good.  (There are also references to a character called Virgil.)

The performances in the two main parts are almost beyond praise (and many of those in the supporting cast are very fine too).   You never catch these actors acting – yet they’re never submerged in documentary.   Ioan Fiscuteanu is a heavy-set figure; his obdurate masculinity gives a sustained astringency – and a very distinctive pathos – to Lazarescu’s decline.  The real name of the actress playing Mioara is even more appropriately symbolic than that of the eponymous hero.   She is called Luminita Gheorghiu and she is luminously expressive.   Mioara doesn’t stay with Lazarescu purely because she’s altruistic and loyal;   she has a strong sense of what she thinks is right but she’s also bloody-minded.  She’s only a few years younger than her patient; she’s not in great physical health herself (and she sometimes lets the hospital staff know that).    There is an amazing moment in the ambulance when Gheorghiu lets you see the warring questions in Mioara’s head.  How did I get into this situation?  How can I stand it any longer?   How can I leave him?

15 October 2008